I must admit that I was first drawn to this title because I’m a physicist and I inadvertently read the title as Planck’s Law, the law of physics involving blackbody radiation. I was curious to see how somebody could make fiction out of this physics principle. Of course, the title is actually Plank’s Law, and …
Category Archives: life
Signatures of Life on Distant Planets
The science of discovering planets around distant stars has made great leaps in recent years, thousands have been found. Of course, what we’re all waiting for is the discovery of life on any such planet, especially intelligent life. In order to find signs of life from a telescope, there would have to be something about …
Ishiguro Wins Nobel!
One of my all time favorite novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This could not be more well deserved. While there is much that can, and will, be said about his work in the coming days, what really stands out for me is the one foray he made into science fiction, his …
Why I don’t Deserve to Live Beyond Today
Cancer took my mother too soon. One can look at the disease and speculate why it took her when it did, but such reasoning brings no comfort. The essential unfairness of the situation still torments me. Though many years have passed since the day she died, I still can’t get over the feeling that something …
Where are all the aliens?
An article in Science presents research showing that the building blocks of life are more prevalent than previously thought. It says a lot of other things too, but this is what I get out of it. This makes me wonder more than ever about the Fermi Paradox, which states that reasonable assumptions lead to the …
Physics and Art 